Bureaucrat Has Virtually No Brain

No, I'm not talking about George Bush in this post. That's a given. Neurologists in France have confirmed that a civil servant who has worked for years in the French National Tax office has virtually no brain. No, really. It's true. Der Speigel carried the story here. The individual involved had hydrocephalus as a child, which was remedied by the surgical placement of a shunt to release the accumulated fluid on the brain. But not before the fluid had so inflated the meningal ventricles as to compress the remaining grey matter - where cognition takes place - into a small band around the inside of the cranium. Still, the bureaucrat married, had two children and went to work clerking at the tax office. Life imitating the comedic arts. This story is bound to elicit a few chuckles, and a few Duh's.

I am, however, intrigued by the conclusion of the physician involved, who said: "Obviously these few nerve cells can achieve just as much as the millions more cells that other people have." There's another side to this story and a lesson to be learned in that conclusion. Probably more than one. It has long been argued that brain cells don't regenerate. Therefore, as the argument goes, we only use a percentage of the gray matter we have as we need extra cells available for repatterning after brain injury. There is some debate in academia around that issue, as new evidence suggesting cell regeneration is in play. Nevertheless, examples like this one - and it's not the only case of its kind - seem to support the notion that just a few nerve cells can get a lot done. I'm going to stretch at this point, and suggest that this same model applies to the Internet and specifically to the blogosphere. A small plexus of progressive blogs, pulsating with YouTube bursts, can achieve as much as the millions of dollars and mountains of resources available to the MSM and corporate globalists. My grateful thanks to the almost brainless French civil servant for this epiphany.